Grove, Friday August 29 - 1.30pm

Blues, Saturday August 30 - 8.15pm

Crowbar, Sunday August 31 - 12.30pm "Sunday Under The Big Top"

Grove, Sunday August 31 - 2.30pm

THE GIN CLUB

The Gin Club are a musical collective based in Brisbane, Australia who perform an eclectic mix of rock, pop, folk, blues, country, psych, prog, slowcore, and everything in between.

Since their formation in 2003 they have toured Australia, travelled abroad to the U.S, Canada and New Zealand, and played with acts as diverse as Paul Kelly, The Drones, Tim Rogers, Iron & Wine, Lambchop, Midlake, Band of Horses and Laura Veirs, and released three albums to critical acclaim.

Their most recent release is Junk, an ambitious double album featuring 26 original songs by 7 singer/songwriters. A sprawling, ambitious affair, Junk covers a breathtaking amount of musical ground, from rousing gospel rock'n'roll rave ups, to mariachi revenge fantasies to string-laden death ballads. However despite the number of songwriters, influences and styles, Junk has a strikingly cohesive and distinctively Australian feel, in both words and music.

"With this third album, they've harnessed all that creative energy and ambition and crafted a recording with all the beauty and terror and inexorable force of rock music at its finest. Don't miss it. **** ½" Noel Mengel, The Courier Mail March 6, 2008

" Junk is much more than a collection of brilliant songs. The Gin Club bring to mind legends such as The Band in the way that they work as a team to breathe life into each other's material, and their collective musicianship is breathtaking throughout… It's difficult to do justice to this sprawling epic using mere words, but suffice to say Junk is a peerless record of world class standard ...Exquisite. ***** " Steve Bell, Time Off, March 12, 2008

"The folk alt-country soundscapes created by this massive nine-piece are phenomenal, as tracks build from subtle and sparse to exertions of immense power. There is not one out of the 26 songs that deserves special mention above the others on this utterly seamless release. 8.5/10" Nate Shea, Tsunami, May 8th 2008

The Club's members originally came from a group of regular participants at an open mic night held at a Brisbane inner-city pub.. The group's core members - Ben Salter, Ola Karlsson, Bridget Lewis, Conor Macdonald, Brad Pickersgill, Scotty Regan, and Adrian Stoyles - bonded over a love of each other's material, as well as a mutual love of the classics such as The Band, You Am I, Neil Young, Crowded House, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and of more contemporary artists such as Will Oldham, Radiohead, and Spiritualized. They soon began performing together regularly at Brisbane venues such as The Troubadour and Ric's.

The Gin Club feature a constantly shifting line up, both in the studio and when performing live. On stage the band can feature anywhere from 2 to 9 members playing various combinations of acoustic and electric guitars, organ, piano, cello, banjo, mandolin, saxophone and drums. The core songwriting group that met at the open mic night has since been augmented by multi-instrumentalists and songwriters Dan Mansfield and Angus Agars with Matthew Schneider contributing on drums. All except Schneider feature on Junk.

Since forming in 2003, The Club have toured extensively throughout Australia, performing at the Big Day Out, East Coast Blues & Roots, Splendour in the Grass, Gympie Music Muster, Cockatoo Island and Yagubi Festivals, as well as travelling to Canada to participate in Canadian Music Week, and touring New Zealand. In May 2008 they performed at the 2008 Musexpo Conference in Los Angeles, California and drew rapturous acclaim. They are planning a UK/European tour for late 2008.